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Brioche
1 cake yeast 1/2 cup milk, scalded and cooled 2 tablespoons sugar 4 cups sifted flour 1 cup shortening 4 eggs, well beaten 1 teaspoon salt 4 eggs, unbeaten Dissolve yeast and 1 tablespoon sugar in lukewarm milk, add 1 cup flour to make sponge. Beat well. Cover and set to rise in warm place until light, about three-fourths hour. To remainder of flour add 1 tablespoon sugar, softened shortening, 4 eggs and salt. Beat all in well. Add sponge and beat again thoroughly, then other 4 eggs unbeaten 1 at a time, beating thoroughly. Cover and let rise until light--about 4 hours--and beat again. Chill in refrigerator over night. In morning shape by rolling under hand into long strips 3/4 inch thick, bring ends together and twist like a rope. Form into rings, place on well-greased pans to rise. When double in size, glaze with white of egg diluted with water. Bake in a moderately hot oven 15 minutes. Ice while hot, with plain frosting. Spread with thinly sliced, blanched almonds. Makes 1 dozen, small.
A rich yeast dough with eight eggs and a cup of fat, given an overnight chill so it can be shaped cold. The recipe reads as a two-day project and should be treated as one.
- The hinge: keep it coldBrioche dough with this much fat is unworkable at room temperature and impossible to roll into ropes. Take it from the refrigerator and shape it while still firm, returning portions to the cold if the dough begins to slacken and stick.
- One cake of yeastA commercial yeast cake of the period was about 0.6 oz of fresh compressed yeast. Substitute one 1/4-oz packet (about 2 1/4 teaspoons) of active dry or instant yeast.
- ShorteningButter is the traditional fat for brioche and gives the crumb its flavour, but in a book of this date "shortening" could equally mean lard or vegetable shortening. "Softened" means pliable and spreadable, not melted. If you use butter, one cup is 8 oz / 2 sticks, and it should be beaten into the flour rather than poured in liquid.
- Oven temperature"Moderately hot" is 375-400F. Fifteen minutes is right for small rings; they are done when deep gold and the bottoms sound hollow.
- Scalded and cooled milkScalding was standard practice, generally explained as denaturing components of raw milk that slacken the dough. With pasteurised milk many bakers skip it and simply warm the milk to lukewarm, about 100F.
- The two egg additionsEight eggs in total: four beaten in with the flour and fat, then four more whole and unbeaten, one at a time. Add each only after the previous is fully absorbed, or the dough will break and look curdled.
- The 4-hour riseThat is a guide, not a rule. Rich, heavy doughs rise slowly; judge by volume and by a dough that no longer springs back quickly, then knock it down before chilling.
- Glaze and icingEgg white thinned with water gives shine but little colour; a whole egg beaten with a teaspoon of water browns better. "Plain frosting" here is confectioners' sugar moistened with water or milk, brushed on while the rings are hot so it sets thin and translucent.
- YieldOne dozen small rings, as the recipe states.
Brioche is French in origin; the word is attested in French from the early fifteenth century, and a Norman derivation is one of several explanations that have been proposed. What appears here is an Americanised version: not baked in the fluted mould with a topknot, but rolled, twisted into rings, iced and strewn with blanched almonds, which brings it closer to a Danish or a Swedish tea ring than to anything sold in a Paris boulangerie. The long second rise and the overnight chill mean the bulk of the labour falls the day before, leaving the cook only to shape, prove and bake in the morning.